By Vincent Li (Music Researcher & Writer)
Over two nights at the London International Chinese Music Festival, London-based Chinese percussionist Hui Jiang, formerly of the Hunan National Orchestra, showed that in percussion, what surrounds a strike can matter as much as the strike itself.
The mallets go up, and nothing happens
Behind a large bass drum in Holy Sepulchre Church, Hui Jiang settles her weight, lifts her arms and holds. The pause lasts long enough for the audience to start listening to the room itself. Then the first stroke lands. Its low resonance runs through the building and lingers after her arm has gone still.
That held breath ran through Jiang's two appearances at this year's London International Chinese Music Festival. One night belonged to three pairs of small cymbals at SOAS; the next to a big drum in a church with a long, responsive acoustic.
Jiang came to London after five years with the Hunan National Orchestra. At SOAS she performed Guo Wenjing's Drama with Jingyang Li and Julia Luo. The following day, at Holy Sepulchre, she played Robert Zollitsch's Sailing Against the Current, which she had rearranged for the London performance.
SOAS: three pairs of cymbals
The sixth movement of Drama strips percussion down to three pairs of small cymbals, each a different size and pitch. Jiang took the first part. The score depends on how a sound begins, how long it rings, when it stops, and how the body moves in between.
She began with the cymbals close to her body, using small turns of the wrists for the quieter strokes. Louder entries sent her arms upwards and her weight forwards. After each collision came the movement's recurring choice: pull the cymbals back and mute them against the palms, or draw the arms apart and let the metal ring.
That choice gives the movement its character. Each pair produced different voices according to pressure, speed and gesture. Jiang dragged one cymbal slowly across the other to make a long, grainy scrape; open strokes shimmered, while muted ones ended almost immediately. In the quietest moments the gesture shrank to a fingertip or a light touch near the rim. A scrape could become a dry tap, then open into a sound that remained after her hands had parted.
Jiang handled these contrasts with precision, but the playing never felt like a demonstration of technique. The changes in pressure and release gave the movement its tension.
Midway through the movement, the first two cymbal parts each took a short solo before forming a duet. Jiang's clipped phrases met longer scraped sounds as the players interrupted and overlapped one another. She gave the other performer quick glances, then returned to her cymbals.
The performance invited watching as much as listening. An attack was often visible before it was heard: Jiang's arms climbed and her balance shifted in preparation. Movement sat inside the rhythmic structure, not outside it.
The score also asks for voice. Jiang's calls ran alongside the cymbal strokes, folding into the same sequence of gesture and percussion. In the densest passages the three performers combined shouted calls, choreographed movement and the lingering ring of open cymbals, with several layers of sound active at once. In that overlap, the long resonance blurred some of the pitch differences between the three pairs of cymbals.
All of it came down to a running series of small decisions. Every collision posed the same question: let it ring or stop it. The difference between an open stroke and a muted one lay not just in how the metal was struck but in what Jiang did in the instant afterwards.
Holy Sepulchre: the room as instrument
The following day the music moved from SOAS to Holy Sepulchre Church, and the scale moved with it.
Sailing Against the Current comes from the German-born composer Robert Zollitsch, who is known in China as Lao Luo. He wrote it for guzheng, sheng and percussion. For the London performance Jiang rebuilt the piece around the players available. Di Yang took the sheng material on accordion, the balance between guzheng and percussion was reshaped, and Jiang added a new bass-drum solo to open the work.
Then came the solo, and the held pause described above. After the first stroke, Jiang did something counterintuitive. Instead of following the heavy stroke with another, she halted her arm and let the room carry the sound. The next group of strokes began before the previous resonance had fully faded, so each phrase seemed to grow out of the one before it.
This was where the building became part of the performance. In Holy Sepulchre a drum stroke does not end when the mallet leaves the skin. The resonance travels along the walls, lengthening every attack and altering how one phrase relates to the next. Jiang shaped her silences around that reverberation.
The restraint was effective: by refusing to hurry the next attack, Jiang made the church's decay part of the phrase rather than an acoustic after-effect.
After the solo, Melody Ji entered on guzheng with a fast, free-running melodic line, and Jiang slipped short, forceful drum figures beneath it. The pairing worked through a careful exchange of sound and space. When the guzheng grew busy, the percussion thinned out. When the melody paused, a fuller drum figure moved into the space that had opened.
The second section slowed down, and Jiang changed instruments. She left the bass drum for a hand-played drum, and with the mallets set aside, her palms and fingers produced an attack that was softer at the edges and more directly shaped by touch. The two instruments began with wide spaces between their phrases. A melodic gesture from the guzheng could settle completely before Jiang answered with a quiet accent or a short rhythmic figure.
By this point Jiang's role had shifted again. She was no longer the foreground voice she had been in the opening solo. Instead a recurring drum figure began to mark the joints of the piece. Each time the music prepared to change direction, the pattern came back and connected one passage to the next. The notes stayed recognisable, but the meaning changed with the context, because its relationship to the guzheng and accordion was different every time it returned.
The arrangement was most convincing in these shifts of role, which gave the percussion a structural purpose beyond colour.
From Touch to Resonance
The two works also placed Jiang in different positions. In Drama she was one member of a three-percussionist ensemble, working with small cymbals, voice and movement inside a tightly organised texture. In Sailing Against the Current she moved between bass drum and hand-played drum, played alongside Melody Ji's guzheng and Di Yang's accordion, and shaped the London version of the piece as its arranger.
What lingers is how much of the music lived in the gaps. A sound might vanish immediately or remain after the gesture ended. Between those extremes came the lifted arm, turning wrist, held mallet and pause before contact.
Photo credit: UK Chinese Music Festival
